Weekly Podcast

This is it: our last podcast episode. It’s time we stop talking about tech, and get in the game. We’re launching a new business called Majordomo that we hope other tech podcasts will talk about. As such, we feel it’s important to focus and see just how great a company we can make. But don’t worry, we cover lots of topic for our final show. Specifically, Facebook is in a death spiral, Black Panther is HUGE, Google bought Lytro, and Steve Jobs tells us all to have skin in the game.

The promise of a simple blood test that only required a few drops of blood, but would accurately give the result of hundreds of blood test was too good to pass up on. It allowed Theranos to raise hundreds of millions of dollars and achieve a valuation of billions of dollars. Only problem: their tech doesn’t exist and never did. Now that the SEC has gotten involved, we figured we’d finally give our opinion on the whole ordeal.

James and Matthew had a booth at the Lane County Home show. Around every corner they kept an eye out for the highest of tech smart home gadgets, but they were few and far between, if present at all. They thought the question would be “What smart home features should come next?” but instead they discovered it was “What will it take to get them here?!”

BuzzSummo release a report looking at social sharing, which is down by 50% since 2015. Does this mean that social has jumped the sharing shark? The answer is a little complicated, but it’s good news for organzations creating quality content. Check out the show notes below.

Worldwide smartphone shipments dropped for the first time. That means we’re about it hit, if we haven’t already, the peak smartphone era. What that means, and what gets us excited, is it’s the setup for the NEXT BIG THING. In this show we talk about possible next big things and implications or the smartphone industry. Show notes are below.

Sometimes a product requires a new look or feature. Sometimes the change is seen as a disruptive innovation and people love it. Sometimes it’s seen as a tone deaf redesign that inspire people to write petitions agains the change. This week we look into the latest changes from Snapchat and talk about it in the context of other changes like the Facebook timeline, Digg v4 and and iOS change. The show notes are below.

Last week SpaceX launched Falcon Heavy into space. It was only a test flight, but it lit the imagine of millions of people and gave a glimpse of where space travel is headed. In this episode, we gush a little about Elon Musk and SpaceX.

The right to repair question centers around one seemingly unlikely tech company: John Deer. It turns out that tractors are some of the most sophisticated machines (dare we say, robots) with hundreds of sensors, computer components, and software to run all facets of the machine. As a result, repairs have become more complicated and companies like John Deer are choosing to lock down their software to prevent unauthorized repairs.

Of course, this presents a problem for farmers. Not only do authorized dealer repairs tend to cost more, they’re also not always conveniently close to the farm. To them, it feels like the big companies are simply trying to squeeze them for more money.

It’s a debate that has implications on all hardware/software devices: your phone, computer, washing machine, refrigerator, car, and more. This week we dive into it… and spoiler alert… we don’t really come to any hard conclusions. It’s complicated.

This week we explore the unintended consequences of decisions different tech companies, and their leaders, make. For example, Strava published a cool map of user activity and accidentally showed secret military bases. IKEA flat packed furniture to save money, which turned out to increase customer love for their products.

We then look at decisions made last week that will probably also have unintended consequences. For example, will raising the fee music steamers have to pay impact how Spotify, Apple, Amazon, and Google strike deals to musicians. Will Elon Musk’s new compensation plan cause him to play short-term gain plans? Will Snapchat’s decision to open their walled garden doom their company? We look at each of these in this week’s show. The details for each are in the show notes below.

It turns out that PC processors have a bug. A bug called Meltdown, which allows hackers to get control of your PC and access all sorts of information. Intel, and others are melting down over this particular problem because it’s not an easy fix. You can patch it, but it will probably slow your computer down. We go into the story of what it is, how it was discovered, and how companies are melting down reacting to it. See below for the show notes and articles.